The story is about the Indian Tizoc (Pedro Infante) who falls passionately in love with a white girl (Maria Félix) whom
he mistakes for the Virgin Mary. He thinks that she has agreed to marry him when she hands him her handkerchief (a symbol
of commitment in his culture). The story, of course, ends tragically for all involved with the girl accidentally killed and
Tizoc committing suicide with the same arrow so that their souls can enter two doves and continue to sing to "Tata Dios."

The site of advanced Amerindian civilizations,
Mexico came under Spanish rule for three centuries before achieving independence early in the 19th century. A devaluation
of the peso in late 1994 threw Mexico into economic turmoil, triggering the worst recession in over half a century. The nation
continues to make an impressive recovery. Ongoing economic and social concerns include low real wages, underemployment for
a large segment of the population, inequitable income distribution, and few advancement opportunities for thelargelyAmerindian population in the
impoverished southern states.

Because a majority of its inhabitants are Indians, Guatemala is also one of the saddest countries in the world. Officially
these small, brown, peaceful, resigned, and often drunk men make up 53 percent of the population. But they make up more
than 70 percent if we take into account all those who, on leaving their mountains, call themselves 'ladinos', mestizos, and
live in the cities. Despite their name not a single drop of Spanish blood runs in their veins and they have lost their
tribal structures and their community-owned lands.

The story concerns Bernard, an alpha whose programming is a bit off--he
is discontented and desires to spend time alone just thinking orlooking at the stars. At one point he takes Lenina on
a vacation tothe savage reservation in New Mexico. There he discovers John (theSavage), son of Linda who had visited
the reservation more than 20years previously and was accidentally left behind. When shediscovered she was pregnant
(the ultimate humiliation!), she had toremain among the savages. John returns to the Brave New World wherehe is feted
as the Visiting Savage. However, he cannot adapt to thistotally alien society and, ultimately, he takes his own life.

By David R.M. Beck Associate Professor, Native American Studies, University of Montana February, 2001

By the early 20th century, when Edward Curtis began the work on what came to be the
twenty-volume publication featured on this

website, American Indian nations and people were largely viewed by scholars, government officials
and the public at large as a vanishing race. This belief was buttressed by two scholarly theories: 1) the view that America's
continental "Manifest Destiny" was successfully completed in geographic terms, that the "frontier" had been closed by Euro-American
expansion into every part of this nation; and 2) Social Darwinism, which posited that cultures battled with each other in
an evolutionary contest in which one was destined to triumph and the other to fade into extinction. This theory dovetailed
both with demographic evidence, embodied in a precipitous drop in Native populations, and with the federal policy of forced
assimilation, which even most supporters of Indian people believed to be the only hope for Indian survival in the new century.
In popular terms, these views were reinforced in wild west shows, world fairs, art, literature and a variety of other venues,
all of which helped lay the foundations for the American public's long-standing misinterpretation of American Indians.

By Curtis's time American Indians had endured a highly destructive, centuries-long assault on their homelands, their societies,
and their cultures in physical, spiritual, and emotional terms. Under the guise first of religion and then science, Euro-American
invaders had stripped the indigenous communities of this continent of nearly all of their land and resources, and carried
forth an all-out attack on their languages, religions, educational systems, family structures, and systems of governance.
For centuries missionaries, soldiers and government officials led this assault. By Curtis's time, humanitarian reformers,
social and physical scientists, and artists lent their authority to these efforts as well.

Rapid population decline followed, and sometimes preceded, Euro-American invaders, caused not only by warfare and capture
for slavery, but by diseases which Europeans had brought to this continent. The combination of violence and disease caused
some tribal communities to lose as much as ninety percent of their member populations. As wave after wave of disease hit at
times of early contact, communities might lose a quarter to a third of their populations time and again. This type of population
loss continued well into the nineteenth century, as western tribes had first contact with Euro-Americans, and as eastern tribes
were forced one after another to remove from their homelands to west of the Mississippi, with conditions weakening old and
young alike, making them more susceptible to starvation and disease. All in all, a land that may well have held seven to ten
million American Indians at the time of Columbus's arrival contained approximately a quarter of a million by 1900.

....

Myth of "The Vanishing Race" Endures

This imagery had long been a part of popular culture, but the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and the end of the Plains
Indian wars, Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 announcement that the American Frontier had closed, and the federal attempts
to forcefully eradicate Indian culture and assimilate Indians into American society all converged in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries to firmly cement that imagery as a myth of a vanishing race, with the notion that Indians
are historical features of an American landscape, not functioning members in a modern society. Ironically the federal policy
of forced assimilation was in itself a recognition that Indians had not disappeared from America, and the official reversal
of that policy in the 1930s, however effective or ineffective that reversal may be judged to be, was also an acknowledgement
that Indians had not vanished as either a people or as political communities. Indian cultures, though badly damaged by all
of this, managed to survive in reality, but not in the mythology of the larger culture. It was within the context of this
mythology that Curtis took these photos, and his doing so contributed in no small way to the continued pervasive presence
of the myth of the vanishing race in American society even into the present time.

Stolen Continents: The "New World" Through Indian Eyes. by Ronald Wright.

Notes by Dr. Steve Collins, for North American Indians, SO-126.

Part 3: Rebirth.

AZTEC

In 1810, father Miguel Hidalgo asked his countrymen, over half of whom were Indian, "Will you free yourselves?"
as he waved the Banner of Tonantzin-Guadalupe. He wanted to recover the land that had been stolen three hundred years earlier.
He had an army of 80,000 troops. But he waited. Had he attacked immediately he might have won. He was captured and died before
a firing squad in 1811.

In 1815, Jose Maria Morelos, a more radical priest shouted the names of Moctezuma and cuauhtemoc and for a time
controlled part of the Empire. But he too was shot in 1815.

Benito Juarez, born in Oaxaca in 1806, was a Zapotec. First Indian leader since pre-colonial times. Hernan Cortez
had made Oaxaca his personal fiefdom. Juarez, who became a Lawyer and congressman introduced a bill to confiscate Cortez
land for the state, and fought for Indian rights in the courts. (244). Juarez further abolishes military/church immunity
from court suit. In retaliation conservatives pass Lerdo Law which abolishes communal property. Civil war emerges
in 1858 and in 1861 Juarez becomes President.

(MALINCHISMO= after Cortez's mistress, it means a desire for anything foreign.)

Between 1921 and 1940: extended jurisdiction from capital to states;controlled
12,561 rural primary schools, 720,000 students

After 1930, emphasis was in the rural areas

Rural primary teachers:
from 6,504 in 1930 to 19,134 in 1940

Enrollment in public primary schools: 34% in 1928; 54% in 1940

Also, after
1930: textbooks began to present the official views ofthe post-revolutionary state

State intellectuals
and other agents constructed the revolution as apopular movement against Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship

Celebrated
heroes (Zapata, Villa, Carranza)[75th anniversary coin]

Rebellion and struggle for social justice were emphasized

Moved
the focus to the countryside

Rejected religious "superstition" and priests' exploitative practices

Gave children
a role in the construction of the fatherland

Used popular music to disseminate ideas; compiled folklore andtraditions

"Misiones
Culturales" and "Escuelas Rurales Normales" were created;magazines such as "El maestro rural"

A "national" (mestizo)
culture was celebrated and disseminated(the "browning of Mexican culture")

Teachers were agents of the state, the
party, and the "nation"(likened to missionaries)

"Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación" (1932)

Cárdenas:
"socialist" education (teachers as agents of radicalagrarismo, vanguard of the agrarian reform)

Education in practice
was not exempt of cultural and politicalconflict and contestation (Cristeros vs. teachers, teachers vs.peasants, local
leaders vs. state authorities)

The Muralist Movement

Diego Rivera

David Alfaro Siqueiros

José
Clemente Orozco

"They are makers of the Revolution. They have given the Revolutioncorporeal form …
captured by the senses" (Roberto de la Selva, 1936).

José Vasconcelos (1929):

"In Mexico I had
success in establishing the state as patron, andthe state has its own philosophy, no matter how mediocre it mightbe.
The State is short sighted and sectarian, serves the party andnot the people, but nevertheless is better than the commercialpatrons
of exhausted Paris "schools". The majority of artists in mytime voluntarily accepted the guidance of their official patron,
whotrue to his duty gave them not only economic support, but a fixedroute for their creation."